Porter brought an upright piano with him to school and found that music, and his ability to entertain, made it easy for him to make friends. Cole wanted his grandson to become a lawyer, and with that in mind, sent him to Worcester Academy in Massachusetts in 1905. Porter's father was also a talented singer and pianist, but the father-son relationship was not close. His father, a shy and unassertive man, played a lesser role in Porter's upbringing, although as an amateur poet, he may have influenced his son's gifts for rhyme and meter. She falsified his recorded birth year, changing it from 1891 to 1893 to make him appear more precocious. He learned the violin at age six, the piano at eight, and wrote his first operetta (with help from his mother) at ten.

Porter's strong-willed mother doted on him and began his musical training at an early age. After high school, Porter returned to his childhood home only for occasional visits. Cole built the couple a house on his Peru-area property, known as Westleigh Farms. O.' Cole, 'the richest man in Indiana', a coal and timber speculator who dominated the family. His mother, Kate, was the indulged daughter of James Omar 'J. His father, Samuel Fenwick Porter, was a druggist by trade. Porter was born in Peru, Indiana, the only surviving child of a wealthy family. He also composed scores for films from the 1930s to the 1950s, including Born to Dance (1936), which featured the song ' You'd Be So Easy to Love' Rosalie (1937), which featured ' In the Still of the Night' High Society (1956), which included ' True Love' and Les Girls (1957). His numerous hit songs include ' Night and Day', ' Begin the Beguine', ' I Get a Kick Out of You', ' Well, Did You Evah!', ' I've Got You Under My Skin', ' My Heart Belongs to Daddy' and ' You're the Top'. Porter's other musicals include Fifty Million Frenchmen, DuBarry Was a Lady, Anything Goes, Can-Can and Silk Stockings. It won the first Tony Award for Best Musical. His shows of the early 1940s did not contain the lasting hits of his best work of the 1920s and 1930s, but in 1948 he made a triumphant comeback with his most successful musical, Kiss Me, Kate. Unlike many successful Broadway composers, Porter wrote the lyrics as well as the music for his songs.Īfter a serious horseback riding accident in 1937, Porter was left disabled and in constant pain, but he continued to work. After a slow start, he began to achieve success in the 1920s, and by the 1930s he was one of the major songwriters for the Broadway musical stage. Classically trained, he was drawn to musical theatre.

Many of his songs became standards noted for their witty, urbane lyrics, and many of his scores found success on Broadway and in film.īorn to a wealthy family in Indiana, Porter defied his grandfather's wishes for him to practice law and took up music as a profession. Cole Albert Porter (June 9, 1891 – October 15, 1964) was an American composer and songwriter.

Kaleidoscope lyrics